Crawl, Walk, Run

I believe the title phrase came from one of Jim Collins' books, on how people and companies can learn and develop new skills. In part, it is about maintaining discipline.

For example, when my husband tries out a new recipe, he is a stickler for sticking to it exactly, the first few times. (I, on the other hand, see recipes as a starting point. It's not unusual for me to look at the ingredients list and say "I don't like this, so I'll substitute that.")

When it comes to building a Lego MindStorms robot, I've been trying to stick with the crawl - walk - run discipline that my husband used in cooking. So our first robot, is straight from the Robotics Invention System book that came with the kit.

Fixing Things

Another way that IT is related to the other disciplines, is that most office workers need computers to do their work. Living in a digital age, we all have to understand and take responsibility for some level of information technology, at least in our own life.

Last week, I successfully re-installed Ubuntu on my laptop, as a dual-boot system. The big difference is, now the default login is to Ubuntu instead of Windows. I can manage that.

I downloaded VirtualBox and created a Virtual Machine (VM) on Ubuntu that runs Windows XP, and installed the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Information System 2.0 on it. The USB Tower still doesn't register. (In fact, internet on the VM has been iffy.) I also loaded the "Guest Additions" software, so that I could access files from the Ubuntu system on the VM.  I'm proud of what I've managed so far, with that.

That being said, today I need to check the job boards again, and finish my C++ lab. I think I have all of the code the assignment calls for, but I need to update some syntax for it to compile.

I know I haven't gotten into the challenging Feminist arguments in this first week of blogging. Given the things that have happened in the past year, there are some precautions I needed to take, well before this profile reaches the Koolaid Point. I'll give my perspective on background information tomorrow.